MOTORHEAD: LOVING THEM LIKE REPTILES

Motorhead are so fucking LOUD my ears are already bolting for the door so they can hop a bus and flee home to the security of my low-watted stereo! And it’s only the first verse of the first song! So this is that “total undifferentiated roar” I’ve always bragged up when I praise the MC5’s Kick Out The Jams. Life’s really kicking art’s ass now as Motorhead gives me a cochlear implant of two dozen AW Marshalls!

The notorious Lemmy’s vocals, and even Phil Campbell’s and Wurzel’s guitars are just tinny squeaks floating on top of the mung rush of total sonic bass fuzz that’s assaulting all me orifices simultaneously. [Aye, laddie, and we’re just the sweet pea’s who’ll be openin’ those orifices for ye.—Eds.yMelody’s just a persistent memory of sorts, while my central nervous system’s being destroyed by these brash Limeys, who don’t even

bother to pay me the 10-cent deposit. It’s all speed & noise & smoky haze. Lemmy has his mike set high on the stand so he can sing up toward it, and the spotlight rays falling down through the fog illuminate his upturned, mustachioed, longhaired face so that he looks almost like...that fellow all the Cycles For Christ types worship! Who ^ ~ woulda thought it!

But then, Lemmy (Ian) Kilmister and his Motorhead are the Saviors of choice of all us embittered old rockwriters who are pissed that punk didn’t catch on with the general rubes. Now we gotta make some kinda accomodation with the resurgent heavy metal if we wanna draw r’n’r breath at all and thus Lemmy’s our man. Because he’s SMART and FAST like rock s supposed be, that s why!

Except that Lemmy himself doesn’t necessarily see it that way. Flashback to right before the show, down in the dressing room catacombs beneath the stage, and I can’t seem to get Lemmy fired-up enough to acknowledge even a crumb of his newly-won antiherohood. Granted that l W I’m not the world’s most dynamic interviewer, still I’ve listened to Ace Of enough times since 1980 that the grooves are going as gray as my hair. I figured all I’d have to do is open my notebook and those wonderful one-liners would roll off Lemmy’s tongue-of-destiny like they did for John Mendelssohn last year (CREEM, December ’83).

Check it out: I stride purposefully into the dressing room, grab Lemmy’s hand, and snot out, “So you do exist!” as though he’s as fond of all this Lemmy-asmung-idol-OBJECT jazz in the music mags as we scribes are. Can the image already, as now Lemmy’s sprawled on the sofa, and even though the black duds, the hair, the moustache, the warts (they do exist!) make him resemble .38 Special’s oldest & most trusted roadie, he speaks British! So precisely and articulately that maybe he shouls take up narrating PBS documentaries on the Lake Region if metal fades again. I was expecting crushed amphetamines and tongue-happy groupies, but instead I’m being coolly eyed over the moustache by a black-shirted Aleister Cook!

Lemmy’s so unready to play Lemmy for me that I make one disconnection after another. I refer to some long-lost late-’70s British interview in which Mr. Kilmister supposedly compared Motorhead’s music to the then au courant punk, and he responds now, “I didn’t say that it was like punk. I said it was ‘hard rock.’ ” Hey, I was trying to compliment you with that punk tag, man, but let’s skip the semantics, I’ll fish some more for an opening.

I ask Lemmy if he ever got a chance to see the Dead Boys, and he responds positively about chief Boy Deads Stiv Bators and Cheetah Chrome—"Cheetah projected a real personality on stage..." Fine, fine, I rush on like a speedfreak whose calcium-robbed bones are starting to crumble beneath him, “My idea, Lemmy, is that you should cover the Dead Boys’ ‘Sonic Reducer’ because it sounds like a great Motorhead song!”

His eyes look like I’ve suggested that he go down on Wayne Newton in an attempt to boost Motorhead’s sales with the Las Vegas crowd, but goddam if Lemmy doesn’t have a classically British stiff upper lip beneath that droopy moustache! “Don’t you mean ‘Rocket Reducer’?” he coolly chides me. “Ah no, that was the MC5,” he answers himself. “Right, ‘Sonic Reducer,’ ” I plunge back in. “Not only is it a great tune, but you could give Stiv and Cheetah some much-deserved royalties that way!”

The tips of Lemmy’s Western-sheriff oustache twitch imperceptibly. "Ha! I want to get some royalties for myself." And here comes my worst faux pas of the evening, "But I thought you'd want to help out a band that’s your roots..” What I meant to say is “a band that shares your roots,” but Lemmy’s already off & snorting. “I’ve been playing music for 23 years, don't talk to me about ‘roots’!”

“But,” I interject, trying to shame Lemmy into exhibiting the humanitarianism that’s endeared him to so many other writers, “you were glad to give Girlschool a hand when they were starting out.” “Well, that was different,” says Lemmy, all cool & analytical again, “They’re an active, working band. Why should / help a band that gave it up five years ago?”

Through all this, brand-new Motorheads Pete Gill (ex-Saxon drummer) and Phil Campbell (ex-Persian Risk guitarist) have been hovering about me, feeding me potables & quotables that’ll keep me feeling fine toward Motorhead the band, even if Motor(figure)head Lemmy could care less about selling himself to this fumbling Yank journalist. Thanks anyway, guys, but I bought the whole Motorhead mystique way back when, and anything Lemmy doesn’t say now won’t kill my interest in Motorhead.

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CONTINUED FROM PAGE 31

I give up my campaign for the Dead Boys, as I’m actually a nice guy who’s not unmindful of the niceties of the blond lass in the corner, the one who’s been making motorhome eyes (the band’s bus is out back in the “car park”) at Lemmy throughout my joker interrogation. I ask Lemmy for one final word for the CREEM readers, and he comes on like he’s been watching too many Twisted Sister videos, too: “Lock up yer parents and throw a match under the door (make sure you get their money for tickets, and their car keys, first) and come out and see our show!”

Maybe, maybe not. Back out in front of the live Motorhead, with the incessantly wired roar now beginning to resolve itself into recognizable songs, I reflect that probably Lemmy can’t afford to upscale himself and reveal his own smarts to these new intellectual camp followers of Motorhead. Not too often, anyway. Wouldn’t wanna disappoint the kids who come out for a night of being sonichammered into emotional integerhood.

“I wanna see a pair of tits!” shouts Lemmy at the mike, and the impulsive babe right beside me pulls up her sweater to reveal a set of nipples more pert that Martha Quinn’s nose. Pete Gill gets in the spirit and drops his red gym shorts one sec, just long enough to reveal where he §tores his spare drumstick, and the band rushed into “Jailbait.” Three & a half Ramone-sized minutes later, Lemmy announces, “I’ve just been informed there’s a pair of tits visible in the back. This is your song!” And the band kerrangs right into the moving “Killed By Death”!

Wotta guy that Lemmy Kilmister, an incurable romantic, a big-hearted altruist, a reluctant smart guy, all in the midst of the most cynical rock market since Rick Dees was hatched from his duck egg! (And I don’t blame Lemmy a minute for not wanting to be a prizeexhibit speedfreak in the noo-metal zoo, wouldn’t think of characterizing him as much meself.)